The polysemous cognates English go, German gehen and Norwegian gå : a corpus-based contrastive study

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Abstract

The cognates English go, German gehen and Norwegian gå are among the most frequently occurring verbs and are found to express several different meanings. This thesis aims to describe English go, German gehen and Norwegian gå in a contrastive perspective. The study follows Viberg’s classification of meaning, as presented in his paper on “The Polysemous Cognates Swedish gå and English go” (Viberg, 1999a).

The main chapters of the thesis describe the distribution of the verb go according to different semantic categories: locomotion, metaphorical and grammaticalized meanings; according to syntactic categories: intransitive, simple copular, multi-word forms (phrasal verb, prepositional verb, phrasal-prepositional verb, verb + verb combination), grammaticalized uses (be going to and go on); and according to their German and Norwegian translations. In a concluding chapter the main results of the thesis are compared and the differences and similarities between the three cognates are summarized.

Go, gehen and gå share many of the same meanings, i.e. they have overlapping polysemies. However, they show certain language-specific developments, such as grammaticalized uses of go, where they do not overlap at all. The English verb go and its German and Norwegian counterparts gehen and gå seem to be more alike on a general level but contrast greatly on a detailed level. Even though German gehen and Norwegian gå were used as translations of English go in only about one third of the cases, they are clearly the main counterparts of their corresponding cognate. No other translation equivalents come close in terms of frequency. Occurrences where gehen and gå could not be used in the translations are situations which point towards semantic differences between the cognates go, gehen and gå. For example, when go refers to locomotion with a human subject in a vehicle, German and Norwegian tend to use other verbs, particularly German fahren and Norwegian dra and kjøre. Self-propelled motion and motion in a vehicle both seem to be primary features of the English verb go when it is used in its basic meaning, i.e. locomotion. In contrast, German gehen describes motion on foot with a human subject and can imply motion in a vehicle only metaphorically. The same seems to be true of the Norwegian verb gå. In cases where other correspondences occur, they are distributed across a rather large number of verbs, which emphasizes the neutral semantic content of the verb go.